Winner of the 2006 Costa Poetry Award
Letter to Patience is a book-length poem in iambic pentameter, set in
'Patience's Parlour', a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria in
1993 - a time of political unrest. The writer of the letter has returned
to Britain, with his Nigerian wife and children, to nurse his dying
father.
He writes to Patience, the bar's owner, a woman in her 30s who once
lectured in politics at Ahmadu Bello University, across the main road
from her bar. She gave up her job partly because of junta pressures on
radical academics. The town is volatile - the bar was attacked by the
so-called Ayatollahs and would have been burnt had it not backed onto
the property of her Hausa landlord.
There are also thoughtful and elegant digressions thrown up by the
multiple narratives. The book is not merely biography or an essay on
colonialism and post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful
and troubled country and one man's search for meaning in difficult
times.
"A marvellous book, an exemplar of sorts; as for the virtuosity it is
entirely at the service of a vision."
George Szirtes
John Haynes has had a long career in education, and was a lecturer
at the Ahmadu Bello University in the 70s and 80s, where he founded the
literary journal, Saiwa. After returning to the UK he has continued
teaching, writing and publishing and his poems have appeared widely.
Sections of Letter to Patience have been published in The London
Magazine, Stand, Poetry Review, Ambit, Critical Quarterly and
Poetry Wales. Haynes is the author of a number of books: on teaching,
language theory, African Poetry and stories for African children, as
well as two volumes of poetry. He has won prizes in the Arvon and
National Poetry Competitions.
